It is all obvious or trivial except…

Timmy in Nature

So I appear to have a piece in Nature. Here. It\’s under \”correspndence\” when it\’s really a letter to the editor. Here\’s, for it\’s paywalled, what was the agreed final draft:

No shortage of
mineral reserves
Jeremy Grantham sounds
an unnecessary alarm about
the “impending shortage” of
phosphorus and potassium
fertilizers (Nature 491, 303;
2012). With phosphorus
constituting 0.1% of the
lithosphere and potassium 2.5%,
supplies are likely to outlast our
species, possibly even the planet
itself.
Grantham assumes that
mineral-reserves numbers
are indicators of resource
availability. However, ‘reserve’ is
an economic and legal concept
that has nothing to do with the
quantity of material available
(see go.nature.com/2zhzqf).

A reserve represents the amount
of an ore or element that has
been drilled, tested, measured
and defined, and which can
be extracted using current
techniques and at current prices.
It costs a great deal to confirm
all those points for a particular
mineral deposit, so it is done
only for those likely to be used in
the coming decades.
‘Resource’, by contrast, denotes
the amount of the same ore or
element that is out there, with
prior knowledge of roughly
where it is, how much there
is and what it will be used for.
Resources are transformed into
reserves by spending money —
and only when that is necessary.

Every generation exhausts its
reserves of almost all minerals,
because the tendency is to
convert only enough resources
into reserves to last for a
generation.
The resources of phosphate
and potassium fertilizers are
sufficient for many thousands
of years of current usage. On
that timescale, total element
availability is probably more
important as a limit.
Tim Worstall Adam Smith
Institute, London; and Messines,
Portugal.
timworstall@gmail.com

I did offer them a chopped down version of this and what we ended up with was this letter.

So, the question now is, \”correspondence\” in Nature. Does this equate to \”being published in Nature\” in the technical sense of that word? Does this now mean that I have two scientific publications to my name? Or is that much too grand for what is, after all, just a letter to the editor?

On the other hand, I congratulated an acquaintance on his recent knighthood: what luck, said I, that you didn’t get it under Blair so that there’s no need to put your Sir in inverted commas. Do you know, the bugger just scowled: some people, eh?

Grumpy Old Man – “It depends whether the editor is forced to resign over the publication of your letter or not.”

Let’s hope some Greens angry reject this bit of common sense. Then the correspondence might carry on for a few editions. TW will end up being highly cited – and so a poorly paid, under appreciated, overly bureaucratic Academic career will await!

The real question is: does this represent a real contribution to knowledge, the result of your research? The answer is clearly No. This is well-known stuff. All you’re doing is telling people what ought to be the bleedin’ obvious.

Always funny to see WMC demonstrating that he doesn’t actually know what peer review is. Here’s a hint for you, Billy: peer review is not only the limited basic error checking pre-publication, but also, and more importantly, what happens after publication when one’s ‘peers’ ‘review’ one’s work and either use it, ignore it, or rebut it.

I’m afraid that Tim has clearly been published in Nature, although he would not be able to cite this as a publication in a proper academic CV.

It is also worth noting that publication is valid even when, as here, it is simply presenting what is knowledge probably widely held in one sphere to those in another – because the idea of academic publication is to spread knowledge, so transferring said knowledge from those who know it to those who apparently (in this case Jeremy Grantham, who hopefully has had the chance to read the letter) do not is exactly what academic publishing does.

So in summary, Tim is published in nature, but not ‘published’ in nature – unusually I can actually agree with William that this is not peer reviewed (for what that is worth – and I say that as a peer reveiewer…).